Being able to identify and track objects as they move throughout buildings or other indoor areas with high precision is important for a wide variety of applications. Systems designed to track objects in this way, often called real-time locating systems (RTLS), find use in manufacturing, warehousing, retail inventory management, and medicine, to name a few areas.
Unfortunately, current methods of object locating used by RTLS are frequently associated with cost and/or usability issues.
Tracking low-power beacons within a physical space can be particularly challenging because the signals transmitted by low-power beacons may not travel long distances (e.g., due to the low-power nature of the signal transmission), and can be transmitted intermittently (e.g., to minimize power consumption). This limited distance and intermittent transmission can preclude object tracking using a central hub, router, or tracking center, especially in large physical spaces. Including more hubs within the physical space can be cost-prohibitive.
Furthermore, the objects (to which the low-power beacons are attached) can be mobile. This can further compound the problems discussed above, as the locations of the low-power beacons must be continually monitored. Because these hubs require a large amount of power to constantly scan for, receive, and decode the beacon signals, the hubs require significant amounts of power. This power requirement means that the hubs must be connected to a constant power source, such as the power grid. However, this would require power cords to be run through the physical space—either over the interior surfaces (e.g., over the floors and walls), which can be undesirable from an aesthetic and safety perspective, or underneath the interior surfaces (e.g., through the floors and walls), which is difficult and costly to install and change.
Additionally, the low-power beacon location determined by these hub systems can be inaccurate, particularly when the hub includes an omnidirectional antenna. This is because the hub can determine that the low-power beacon is located within an estimated distance from the hub (e.g., based on RSSI values), but cannot determine the direction in which the low-power beacon is located. An extremely high density of hubs would be required to obtain a higher-resolution estimate of the low-power beacon location; however, this high hub density merely amplifies the cost and power issues discussed above.
Thus, there is the need in the wireless communications field to create systems and methods for object tracking with wireless beacons in the wireless communications field. This invention provides such new and useful systems and methods.